Two weeks ago I was in Quebec City for the annual conference of the Canadian Association for Health Humanities (CAHH) – “Creating Space” – this was the 13th conference. It was fully (well, ~90%) in-person after a hybrid return in Calgary in 2022 and it was buzzing! There were people from health professions, humanities disciplines – artists, academics, students, and practitioners. The 60 or so presentations came in various forms – traditional presentations with question and answer, workshops, and performances. It was exciting to spend two days with like-minded people and with such a profusion of different ways of envisaging and producing meeting points between health and humanities.
Amongst sessions I attended:
- bringing humanities into teaching professional identity to medical students, including visits to museums, and discussions of the history of psychiatry that included service users
- a professor of literature in a US liberal arts college who asked her students how they thought about their bodies and was brought up short by one response, “a body that competes” – which led to an exploration of how college athletics, driven by financial incentives, had fostered an inflexible culture of individual performance that became almost cult-like in its grip on students’ lives
- a musical performance of song, where the songwriter, a medical student, invited interpretive discussion then talked about her own creative decisions behind the songs
- a program to support patient storytellers in shaping and telling their stories, where presenters included a woman who talked about being with her husband as he lived with terminal cancer
- a performance of a recent – COVID-time – adaptation of Camus’ The Plague put on by medical students, followed by a discussion of what affected them as they rehearsed and performed
- the opening plenary session by Lisa Boivin, who is a Dene artist and bioethicist who has just completed a PhD at the University of Toronto. She talked about the institutional resistances to working with visual media and storytelling as her PhD dissertation, with a lot of humour, and beautiful examples of her work combining traditional animal lore with collage, symbols of modern medicine, and even high fashion.
Just as powerful were the conversations at every turn about common points of interest. I talked with a social worker who said that she noticed in her discipline a similar phenomenon to nursing, that humanities are present but fragmented, without a common language to show their presence. With a palliative care nurse, I discussed Buddhism, mindfulness, and interconnection and how the Mahayana “two truths” tradition acknowledges the sharp corners of everyday life that mean we go on practicing. I met a UK surgeon who runs an international program teaching values based medicine, and we found common ground in the significance of dialogue and listening, from my side using hermeneutic research. Aside from that, we also worked out we had trained in our respective professions at St. Mary’s Hospital in London at the same time and had worked on the same surgical unit as junior doctor and newly qualified RN.
I realized properly for the first time why it is called “Creating Space” – a recurrent theme, across many different points of approach, was the scarcity and importance of making space to listen and be heard in healthcare, for patients and providers. Arts and humanities can create a host of different ways of stepping back, pausing to listen, looking in, reaching out, touching, witnessing, playing, that make us more aware of where we are, what is happening around us, to us, inside us, and giving us new ways to move. If you have not already been there, and if you have, look out for Creating Space 14 in 2024 – – location TBD!
Nursing and Humanities 